


And Centuries Broke Us Apart

by thefrenchmistake



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Death, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Multi, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-10
Updated: 2020-02-10
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:53:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22654297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thefrenchmistake/pseuds/thefrenchmistake
Summary: She feels magic prickle under her skin, nebulas waiting to paint themselves on the pale canvas that is her body. She doesn’t know wether she’s alive or if this is all a dream; she always hopes for the last, but it never is.
Relationships: Merlin & Morgana (Merlin), Merlin/Arthur Pendragon (Merlin), Merlin/Morgana (Merlin), Merlin/Morgana/Arthur Pendragon (Merlin), Morgana/Arthur Pendragon (Merlin)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 43





	And Centuries Broke Us Apart

**Author's Note:**

> I am in love with this show and those three characters, who all deserved better, so I fixed it. Boom BBC.   
> Enjoy !

She feels magic prickle under her skin, nebulas waiting to paint themselves on the pale canvas that is her body. She doesn’t know wether she’s alive or if this is all a dream; she always hopes for the last, but it never is.

In the inside of her eyelids, a story carves itself; blood and death, a golden king and his fallen queen. And a boy, a man, a warlock. Blue eyes are the last thing she sees before she opens hers and wakes up in her nightmare.

The world is somewhat louder and quieter at the same time. There is an urgency, a futile will to go faster, move faster, live faster. The magic stays hidden in the curve of her fingertips, and she never tries to let it out at its fullest. She could rule this world.

But it is not Albion anymore, and she does not wish to rule this foreign country. Her brother (her enemy, her lover, her doom) is gone and everything with him, every will to fight for her birthright (her _blood_ right). There is no one to fight anymore, but the rage in her hasn’t disappeared, and she is forced to control it, to avoid the shadows that try to suffocate her in her sleep. As she suffocated, once, in an empty room of a castle that was never truly hers.

She wakes up with poison on her lips and his name on the tip of her tongue.

Merlin.

He feels magic running away, escaping him; not that he is trying to hold it back.

He wishes he could keep it, he wishes he could feel at home in this world; but it is not Albion anymore, and Arthur is gone. A man’s life does not end with his own, that’s what centuries of pain have taught him. It’s been more than a thousand years since he last saw his face, and he’s been waiting ever since; waiting for destiny to claim its right, but it never had, and Merlin does not know what to do without the guidance of fate, the certainty of his future. The words when he speaks seem foreign, magic having become a legend, Arthur having become the legendary king he was always supposed to be.

But him ? He does not fit in this legend.

Morgana does.

Morgana always fits everywhere he goes, but not quite.

Not quite. She is too sharp edged, too sensitive, too lost. The legend paints her either as the merciful princess who fell in love with the golden prince, or as the hateful and revengeful sorceress that wished to kill everyone she once held dear. In anyways, her story is a tragedy.

They don’t know she is both. They don’t know she has always felt a little lost, an outsider to the castle. They don’t know the servant fell in love with her while she tried to find her place in a hostile castle, while she was scared of her magic and came to _him_. Scared of her dreams, of her abilities, of herself.

They don’t know she left because of a betrayal. Even Arthur didn’t.

It would’ve killed him.

He loved her. As Merlin did. As everyone who had ever known her loved her.

And it killed a part of all of them, when she left, when she supposedly _died_.

But she hadn’t died.

And she was still alive in his memory, in his head, carved against his skull like a burning tattoo.

Green, jade green, twirling in the storm of his thoughts. He sees her every night, and he cannot tell the memories and the dreams apart anymore. The idleness that made her who she was had disappeared.

He sees her for the first time on a rainy day.

The sun is hidden behind huge grey clouds, it’s pouring, the earth becomes mud under his steps and the loneliness is stronger than ever, clawing at his throat and weighing on his shoulders. The remains of the castle, now a museum to the glory of a Golden King, stand tall despite its state, despite its losses and the damages it had witnessed. The glory is long gone, leaving the stones dark and drained of the magic that coursed through them, once. The memories of four people is forever carved in the place, though, and he’s reaching for them, although they faded from his mind a long time ago (he had stopped counting the centuries).

Merlin does not stand tall anymore.

His head is bent down, stubble eating his cheeks, hands buried in the pocket of his blue sweatshirt, fingers no longer twitching. He has been here enough times to know not to feel hope anymore. He’s the only visitor; people rush to their homes when it rains, and the irony is not lost on him.

All the damages done to him were made under the eye of the glowing sun.

Something is odd, though, but he can’t seem to figure out what, to grasp the reason. Like someone tugging at his sleeve, something tugs at his magic, an infuriating poke.

He does not think much of it.

And then he sees her.

She’s standing, tall, head high, soaked hair falling down her back in dark waves, her face pale in the decor of desolation.

His heart stops, but his magic roars.

Eyes glued to the place before her, she does not seem to know he’s here, probably lost in the memories.

He lets himself take her in, her proud posture, daring the world to try and bend her, break her. Her clothes are ones of this era, but he cannot help but think her face does not belong anywhere but in the ancient age. But maybe it’s because he knows her; knows her mind, knows her power. She’s not made for this era, but he guesses she makes it work; she has always been able to shape into whatever they wanted her to be. But she had also always been her own person; she belonged to no one, she belonged to no century.

And he loved her for it.

That’s when she notices him.

Her eyes lock with his, and Gods, he can see all the forests of Albion dancing in her irises, sun playing with the green leaves, he can almost hear the sounds of the river and smell the flowers, the scent of the earth kissed by the morning dew.

She does not move, taking him in, and he wonders what she sees; a young hopeful servant she used to laugh with, an enemy who poisoned and betrayed her, a sorcerer or an old man, broken and beaten by loss and time.

Or maybe she sees something else entirely, closer to the way he’s seeing her. Like the first time; like family; friend; lover. Everything.

It’s like Albion gave them a second chance, drew them back together. Maybe it considers it has taken enough from them, and they gave enough without any promises of victory or happiness, without any consolation prize (though that was not the reason they fought for).

He’s standing a few feet away from her, still sees her scarlet lips part, then form his name- _his_ name, tongue curling around the vowels.

“Merlin”, she says and the name slips from her lips in a familiar way, her tongue slides over the letters with flexibility.

It is soft, and it is warm, and it is everything she expected when she would see him again.

Except it’s not.

He is not the same man she expected to meet. His cheeks are eaten by his dark stubble, his locks aren’t shining anymore, hanging from his head like a too heavy burden weighs his head down and bends his neck.

The corners of his lips speak of loneliness and pain, and then he looks up at her.

And his eyes… God, his _eyes_.

It strikes her, it pains her. She remembers those eyes staring her down as she dies, twice -here, have some water-Goodbye, Morgana-. She remembers those eyes full of sadness and hurt. She remembers, but she wouldn’t need to, just by staring into his eyes she sees. Sees how broken, and how alone he is. Sees the past, the present, and the future. She almost forgets that the last time she saw him, he killed her. A second time.

Except Morgana looks into the blue of his eyes, and she does not see her death this time, no. She sees her salvation.

He stares, stares and stares, as if he cannot clearly comprehend she’s here. She gets that, fuck does she get that. He barely seems real anymore; he had been only a memory for so long…

She is tempted, for a second, to turn around and leave. Except she has lived alone, utterly alone, once.

She doesn’t see why she should inflict loneliness upon herself once more.

She steps forward. She walks to him.

Sometimes, for some decades or centuries, she leaves him behind; it’s not out of cruelty, on the contrary. It’s out of fear; fear that she’ll spoil him, make him become like she once was, like she still feels she is some days. Morgana is so scared that with her bloody touch she will put an un-washable stain on him, a stain of the darkness within her. She feels like a virus, a disease, and she cannot accept to make him like her.

So she flees.

He hurts, although he understands why she does it.

Each time, she comes back, and each time, he accepts her with open arms, a wide smile, and hope in his bright blue eyes; hope that this is the time where she stays, the time where she leaves all of her pain and grief behind, instead of him.

It never is.

He kisses her fears away, tells her he loves her in the ancient language and in the new one, in every language he has ever learned out of the centuries spent on an always evolving Earth. His caresses seem to chase the dark thoughts away, his lips carry a taste of hope and home, and she cannot stop crying until he has reassured her with everything he has.

Each time, she says she is sorry. Each time, she leaves again.

Maybe a century later; maybe a month. It doesn’t matter, because she leaves anyway. Whatever he does, he is not enough, and that knowledge more than anything else hurts them both in the most torturous way.

Some lives are spent apart, with other people, in different worlds. She has a lot of lovers, loves some of them (very few); it is in her nature. It is not in his (although there were women and men that took a piece of his heart; just more of it broken, just more people lost).

But it’s ok.

It’s ok because he knows he is the only one she returns to, the only one she trusts with every piece of her soul, and the only one she truly loves and truly loves her.

And Gods above, does he love her.

So it’s ok.

It may hurt. He may, some days, feel like a failure when he wakes up to cold sheets and tear stains on the pillow; when he closes his eyes harder to avoid being witness of her absence; when he still remembers her birthday, and the dress she wore the first time they met, and how she looked on Arthur’s arm, happy and carefree in a way she had never been again. 

In a way she isn’t now. In a way they could never be again.

But.

It’s ok.

She spends some of her lives with Arthur (although the best ones are always when they’re all reunited together).

She knows Merlin does, too.

But they both want to have him for themselves, for a little while.

And that’s ok. Because they’re always drawn back together.

She spends months searching for him; then she loves him with everything she has, all consuming and warm all at once.

The first time she sees Arthur and decides to stay (for the first time, it’s with Arthur and not Merlin), he finds her when she couldn’t even find herself.

The club is dark, smells like piss, vomit, a nauseous amount of alcohol, sweat, and drugs.

She is getting fucking claustrophobic in this piece of shit of a club, and the cocaine she’s taken earlier is not doing anything to make her forget where she comes from and that she has nowhere to go.

She gets out at the force of her elbows, and as soon as fresh air hits her lungs, she throws up behind a dumpster, and she has never fallen lower (that’s not true; she still remembers trying to kill her loved ones and feeling so alone she tried to kill herself as well).

And then a hand is on her back, cool hand pulling her hair away from her face. She instantly feels safer, somehow, but doesn’t dwell on it as she pukes her guts out.

When she’s finished, she wipes her red lips clean with the back of her hand, and turns her eyes towards the person who helped her.

And gets struck by two blue suns staring back at her.

“Are you alright ?”

Nothing comes to her mind, blank for the first time in… she doesn’t know how many centuries.

“I’m sorry,” Arthur says, his hand leaving her back, taking one step away. “I probably shouldn’t have come from behind like this, but you seemed really not well and…”

“Morgana.”

He stops, smiles a little. And Gods, it’s genuine and innocent and reminds her of the times they played in the castle without a care in the world, not even for his father. It reminds her of her hand in his, of stolen kisses in dark corners, of her champion and his lady, side by side like it should’ve been, like it always should be.

Fate is a cruel mistress, she supposes.

“My name is Morgana,” she says again, more surely.

“Arthur. Pleasure to meet you.”

She snorts, from the situation or the statement, but her nose bruns awfully and she remembers the cocaine that must still be spread at the edges of her nostrils. She wipes it without grace, and feels shame creep up at her. She is in front of the man she loves so much, and her nose burns because she took too many drugs this time, her throat burs because she threw up all the alcohol she had drunk, and her whole body burns with the realization that…

She found him.

He found her.

She almost collapses under the revelation, the simple fact that Arthur is _here,_ when she maybe needs him the most, and thank the Gods for small mercies.

When she comes back to him, on the anniversary of her first death, there is something different that he notices immediately. There is a bounce in her steps (Morgana never bounced, but the new found energy to her walk speaks plenty to him), a glint in her green eyes that reminds him of the young woman she first was.

She kisses him before any word is spoken, and he responds in kind, hand buried in her hair to press her closer.

She is the one to pull back and look up at him, a hope written on her features that he couldn’t have imagined possible.

“Arthur is alive. Here, in this time.”

In this life, she loves him as a brother, a lover, and everything there could ever be between two people; she had been promised to spend her life with him once, and she intends to keep this promise in more than one life from now on.

This sentence changes everything as surely as the first time they were all reunited. Except this time, they have centuries of experience and regrets, while they stay with them, stood in the past. Arthur’s resurrection is the first stone to pave the way they will walk upon from now on.

Morgana introduces them; and something Merlin never thought possible happened.

They become something.

A real something.

Not friends, but lovers, and yet so much more.

The unfathomable intimacy that links them together never gave them a choice. It is a few months before Arthur walks upon him and Morgana, half naked in their bed. While he stays frozen (Jesus, they are as beautiful as all the legends he has read about, and he wonders not for the first time if they are gods walking the Earth), Morgana tilts her head towards him, dark hair falling all the way to the curve at the base of her spine, and smiles.

Then she gets up, places another kiss on Merlin’s lips, whose eyes are staring right into Arthur’s, without an ounce of shame or awkwardness.

She gets up, all long curves and pale skin, and quits the fabric that still covers her legs, leaving her in only her black panties in front of the two men.

Arthur doesn’t know how he doesn’t combust then, but he’s glad he doesn’t, because she extends her hand towards him, an invite and a promise so full of love and hope, it strikes a chord deep in his heart. He doesn’t even think, takes it.

This day is the first time they ever make love all together, limbs getting tangled, huffs of laughter, bright eyes, wandering hands, delicate fingers working their magic as rough ones dig into skin and promise bruises. They have the marks of their making of history on their bodies, and are proud of them. They do not leave the bed for hours, for days -time means nothing with them, Arthur realizes quickly- and he is more than happy to get sucked in their habit of never pausing and always giving and giving without demanding in exchange.

Merlin takes more than Morgana does, he is surprised to find out.

Sometimes gently, sometimes rough, but always taking with an edge that surprises Arthur, as much as Morgana’s compliance in bed.

These nights (and mornings, and days) are the best of his life, and he will cherish the memory of them until he can make new ones.

Arthur dies a week later.

There is one thing Merlin and Morgana had both learned from the world, and the universe itself: it doesn’t like to give, nor to grant wishes.

It likes its balance.

And it doesn’t care.

They drown their sorrow for years after his death, in alcohol, drugs, sex especially. Until all they do is sleep together, trying to rediscover the marks Arthur once left there, trying to draw them out at the sheer force of their will (and nails, fingers, teeth and mouth).

Then, she wakes up one night to Merlin, sitting on the edge of the bed, facing the wall. Before she even opens her mouth, he speaks up.

“I can’t do this.”

Dread seeps inside her veins.

“Can’t do what ?”

“Don’t,” he warns, turning his golden or blue eyes (she doesn’t know the difference anymore, but the blue ones hurt so much she guesses he does it to spare her, and himself).

“Merlin,” she whispers, sliding to him. Her hand grabs his arm gently. “It’s ok.”

Except it’s not.

Not really.

She has always been the one doing the leaving.

But she owes him that much, and so much more.

He turns his head a little, noses at her cheek and she realizes they are both crying. His lips descend on hers, soft and warm and so different from all the times they tried to fuck their anger and despair out.

This time is slow, a little rough, a little soft, and every bit them. She leaves a mark on his hip and he leaves one under her breast, on her heart.

He leaves right after, and she watches him get dressed; she watches the unfamiliar sight of him leaving her.

And she feels dread, but she also feels, dare she say…. relieved.

She misses him so much she carves his name in walls with her fingertips and reaches out for his magic with hers.

But he was right (always so, so right) to leave. She rebuilds herself; she becomes better. And now, oddly, she understands that the answer to everything, as strange as it may seem, isn’t him. It’s her.

She decides who she becomes, whom she loves and how she loves. She is the one deciding to fall back into the dark years or move completely past them and be able to accept herself and Merlin, and Arthur, and everything that ever happened and will happen.

And she wants to love Merlin. So, so much. But for now, she builds her life and likes it, likes the simplicity of her little apartment and the plants she forgets to water and the laundry she forgets to do and the magic still in her veins that she doesn’t choke down anymore.

She feels _good_. 

And she hopes that, wherever he is, he manages to do the same as her.

He comes back one Monday, as she readies her keys to go out, and she opens the door to find him standing there, a fist up.

His beard seems clean and not neglected, she notices first. She resists her urge to hug him, asks softly:

“Are you sure ?”

He smiles, and it’s better now, not so broken and scared, not so desperate to find his lost innocence.

“I am. I can’t live a lifetime without you, I know that.”

Next thing, her mouth is on his and later, he demonstrates that his beard can be put to good use.

(And it is different. It is better. Not so broken and scared, desperate to find something lost).


End file.
